Things Are Looking Up for the Willis Brand

My father took a Jeffersonian, big-tent approach to family. If your name was Willis, that was good enough for him. “Everyone’s a cousin somehow,” he liked to say, “even the ones who got hanged or thrown in jail.” So he would have been pleased with today’s news that Chicago’s Sears Tower, once the tallest building in the world, will be renamed Willis Tower. He would have been surprised to learn that some Willis somewhere started an insurance company. That cousin would have been welcomed into the tent, too, even if he had an edifice complex.

Sears Tower is no more, made obsolete by a company with an edifice complex.

The 110-story Chicago giant will be renamed Willis Tower under a leasing deal announced Thursday. The New York-based owners signed a lease with Willis Group Holdings Ltd., an insurance broker, for 140,000 square feet plus the naming rights.

Willis is the third-biggest company in its field, but it’s taking on No. 1, Chicago’s Aon Corp., in its own backyard. Like Aon, Willis likes to plaster its name on big buildings.

Under Chairman Joseph Plumeri, Willis put its name on a new London office building that opened last July amid pomp featuring the duke of York.

In Chicago, Willis will have bragging rights with its name on the former Sears Tower, the nation’s tallest building. Aon, whose founding chairman is the name-conscious Patrick Ryan, attached itself in 2001 to the former Amoco Building, the fifth-tallest building in the United States and No. 2 in Chicago.

… A tenant at the tower, architect Daniel Coffey, said the renaming “is beyond the pale of stupid” because of Sears Tower’s international prestige. “It’s awful. No one knows who Willis is, even in Europe,” said Coffey, principal of Daniel P. Coffey & Associates Ltd. He said he has two years left on his lease and that the renaming could lead him to move. Read more. [Photo by Brian Jackson/Chicago Sun-Times]

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]